Wednesday, October 26, 2016

Internet of Things: Monster

The IoT — Internet of Things — such a groovy concept,
where all these things, equipped with microchips — toasters, baby monitors, refrigerators,
smartphones, synthesizers — are
equipped with a certain element of sentience, and communicate with each other,
sparing us some bother. For example, your refrigerator burps it's out of eggs.
. . nice to know, no? Maybe even the toilet paper gets a beep. Don't want to
run out of that, do you?

Except, as the recent attack on Dyn DNS demonstrated,
there's a monster brewing in the IoT, and this attack, which took out swathes
of the internet, was a monster on trading wheels.

What can you do? Not sure.

We, here, are going change our router password. The program
responsible for the attack — Mirai — tries to get control of all our useful,
innocent devices, connect them, and turn them against the Internet itself, by
working with simple, off the shelf passwords.